On Knowledge vs. Confidence
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Author Topic: On Knowledge vs. Confidence  (Read 1483 times)
Beet
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« on: November 19, 2014, 04:31:24 PM »

It seems to me that when we say we know something, it is just another word for saying that we are supremely confident in it. The only difference is that the word "confidence" deliberately separates out our psychological state from reality, leaving open the possibility that we could be wrong (overconfidence), whereas knowledge does not acknowledge it. (e.g., "I am confident I am strong" vs. "I know I am strong"). But the only real difference between the two statements is that the latter is more confident, since both reference psychological states of mind that do not say anything about actual strength. Hence knowledge is just an extreme form of confidence.

The obvious objection is that we all know cases where someone (perhaps ourselves) were extremely confident in something, yet it turned out to not be true. Since we were confident in it but did not know it, then confidence and knowledge cannot be the same. The problem with this statement is that it implicitly shifts the point of reference. How do we know that "it turned out not to be true"? Well, for whatever reason we're confident of it. We're comparing their (or our previous) "knowledge" with our present (at the time of making the statement) "confidence", so of course there's going to be a difference. But if we compare our "knowledge" and our confidence, again we find congruence.

Even if we perceive a conflict between what we "know" and what someone else is "confident" in, there is no way to know what the real truth is. All we have is a clash of conflicting confidences, some of which override the others.

For example.
John: "I am confident that Rebecca's birthday is on Thursday."
Mary: "I know you're wrong. She told me yesterday it was on Sunday."
John: "She told me she's been telling people it's on Sunday because that's when her party is, but it's technically Thursday."

One could say that knowledge is that which aligns with the objective (external) truth, whereas confidence does not necessarily do so. So for example, if I look into a room and see a red ball, and think there is a red ball, if the red ball is really there then I have knowledge; but if it is hologram then I only have confidence.

This raises a number of problems. First of all, what is the physical manifestation of "knowledge"? By the above definition, if the red ball is there, then the red ball constitutes a part of the existence of knowledge itself. That is, the red ball a physical building block of knowledge, like the leg of a chair is a physical building block of a chair. This is not how we normally think of knowledge. For example, it would be very strange if the phrase "I would like to get to know you" meant "I would like you to change and become something already in my mind" as equally as "I want to fill my mind with familiarity of your being."

Secondly, how do we know whether the ball is actually there or not? We need to know that it is there or not there in order to determine whether we know it or are merely confident in it, but we can only know it by becoming confident in it by some means. This is circular logic.

Thirdly, if we assume that knowledge is something that exists or does not exist in the mind, then there is no physiological difference between thinking the red ball is there (but it not being there), and thinking the red ball is there (and it is really there). If one were to scan to brain cells, chemicals and electrical signals in my mind in the two difference scenarios, there would be literally no physical difference.

The problem for those who want to distinguish knowledge from confidence is that they can't escape the fact that knowledge is subjective. In order for knowledge to exist, there must be someone there to know or not know (even if the subject is not self-aware). We cannot escape our own minds.

I have developed this further but this is too long already.
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Foucaulf
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« Reply #1 on: November 19, 2014, 05:07:59 PM »

The word you're looking for is justified, as in "knowledge is justified true belief." The consensus is that justified true belief is at least a necessary condition for knowledge, though not sufficient.

There are many types of justification out there, I guess. But even the weakest justification can resolve your apparent paradoxes. Mary can propose "since when has Rebecca pulled a trick like that with the birthday party?" to get John to think differently. We know a red ball exists either by holding it and thinking that sensation of a round thing in our hand justifies the thought, or get someone else to confirm there's a red ball there, among other things. When your thought experiments seem counterintuitive, it's probably a sign that it isn't attacking something as fundamental as you may think.
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Beet
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« Reply #2 on: November 19, 2014, 06:50:58 PM »

The word you're looking for is justified, as in "knowledge is justified true belief." The consensus is that justified true belief is at least a necessary condition for knowledge, though not sufficient.

There are many types of justification out there, I guess. But even the weakest justification can resolve your apparent paradoxes. Mary can propose "since when has Rebecca pulled a trick like that with the birthday party?" to get John to think differently. We know a red ball exists either by holding it and thinking that sensation of a round thing in our hand justifies the thought, or get someone else to confirm there's a red ball there, among other things. When your thought experiments seem counterintuitive, it's probably a sign that it isn't attacking something as fundamental as you may think.

Fascinating. The entire article seems to be centered around justified true belief, the Gettier objections to it, and attempts to mend the Gettier objections, and it mentions that at the beginning that "Socrates articulates the need for something like a justification condition in Plato's Theaetetus." I think I'm beginning to understand Alfred North Whitehead's quote that the European philosophical tradition is a footnote to Plato.

In any case, it appears I have been ranting about a subject which I know very little about, and attacking a strawman. Knowledge is not just true belief, it is justified true belief.

Still, how does justification quite answer all of the objections above? My problem is with the true part, not that it is not justified.

If my belief that a red ball is in the room is only knowledge if the red ball really is in the room (e.g., true), how does this not imply that the red ball is a part of the physical manifestation of knowledge itself? Is this not counter intuitive? Knowledge is supposed to be an internal mental state. One does not think of red balls as constituting a part of knowledge.

In order to label something a justified true belief, one must know that it is true. But in order to get at the truth value of a proposition, one must form a justified true belief. This still seems circular.

And there is no physiological difference between a justified true belief and a justified false belief.

I think it's fascinating that Zagzebski takes down JTB+X, and Williamson writes that knowledge cannot be analyzed.

Also it's fascinating that knowledge is generally thought of as a binary (you know, or you don't) whereas confidence is a continuum of varying degrees. If I am right that knowledge is just another form of confidence, then we should have aspects of degree creeping into questions about knowledge. I believe you see that in the final two sections, the ones on pragmatic encroachment and contextualism, as well as one part about whether the quiz show contestant knows that Elizabeth died in 1603.
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anvi
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« Reply #3 on: November 23, 2014, 05:59:50 PM »

After a long time thinking through problems in epistemology, I guess I've settled (for now) on a kind of fallibalism.  We can garner various levels of what you're calling "confidence" in a belief or a "piece" of knowledge depending on our justificatory criterion and the strength of our evidence or degrees of confirmatory cognitions.  But there is nothing that guarantees that such a belief, though it may be reliably justified for the time being, might not be upset, confuted, supplemented or dispelled entirely by future experience or findings.  It may then be more or less justifiable to hold certain beliefs, or think one is in possession of knowledge about some specific things for the moment, but its possible we may find sometime soon or in the distant future that we were wrong.  We are in almost every conceivable respect limited beings, and so whatever we believe we know will also be limited and provisional. 
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Beet
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« Reply #4 on: November 26, 2014, 10:35:21 AM »

After a long time thinking through problems in epistemology, I guess I've settled (for now) on a kind of fallibalism.  We can garner various levels of what you're calling "confidence" in a belief or a "piece" of knowledge depending on our justificatory criterion and the strength of our evidence or degrees of confirmatory cognitions.  But there is nothing that guarantees that such a belief, though it may be reliably justified for the time being, might not be upset, confuted, supplemented or dispelled entirely by future experience or findings.  It may then be more or less justifiable to hold certain beliefs, or think one is in possession of knowledge about some specific things for the moment, but its possible we may find sometime soon or in the distant future that we were wrong.  We are in almost every conceivable respect limited beings, and so whatever we believe we know will also be limited and provisional. 

Yes, fallibilism is basically encapsulating the discussion above. The fascinating thing about fallibism, is that it seems true or not, depending on whether one is thinking of fallibilism or thinking of something else.

For example, a strong statement of the fallibilist argument might go as follows:
(1) The reasoning that leads to a conclusion (or justification) can turn out to be invalid if there is other pertinent reasoning out there that has not yet been considered.
(2) For any justification, there always might be pertinent reasoning out there that has not yet been considered.
(3) Therefore, all justifications might be invalid.
(4) Therefore, no conclusions can definitely be considered true.

(2) is extremely hard to argue against because to refute it, you would be trying to prove a negative. (1) is extremely hard to argue against for similar reasons- if you don't know what the other pertinent reasoning is, you can't really argue that it can't affect your justification. (3) and (4) follow from the rules of logic.

Of course, there are obviously thoughts for which no possible reason to doubt appear- for example, the statement "This statement exists." is awfully hard to refute.
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anvi
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« Reply #5 on: November 26, 2014, 10:50:49 AM »

Yes, all good points Beet.  The other thing I like about falliblism is that it doesn't necessarily call into question beliefs in which we currently have a great deal of confidence.  We can, that is, make meaningful distinctions between beliefs we consider to have no justification at all, poor justification, adequate justification and strong justification, on various grounds.  Our basis for maintaining a certain set of beliefs will be as strong as the standards we use to verify them and the quality of the kinds of evidence we have in their support.  So, a falliblist can say that there are good grounds for me to believe that something is true under the prevailing circumstances and state of knowledge.  There are just no grounds upon which I can claim anything like "absolute certainty," since, because we cannot know what we will learn in the future, our presently held beliefs may be discovered to be false later on, both in our own lives and in succeeding generations.  Falliblism safeguards our intuitions about strongly supported beliefs, but also acknowledges inescapable human limits, and it's that which strikes me as the great virtue of the idea.
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Gustaf
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« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2014, 11:10:11 AM »

Didn't have time to more than skim the thread, but it seems like someone had already stated the standard philosophical definition of knowledge, which is that you know P when you a) believe P, b) P is true and c) you have good reason to believe P.
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DemPGH
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« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2014, 04:28:08 PM »


For example.
John: "I am confident that Rebecca's birthday is on Thursday."
Mary: "I know you're wrong. She told me yesterday it was on Sunday."
John: "She told me she's been telling people it's on Sunday because that's when her party is, but it's technically Thursday."


That actually does not raise any problems at all. Her birthday is either one of those days, or possibly another. But it is on the same day every year. It just has to be ascertained and communicated what day that is.

We can and do "know" things, like when the Sun will "rise" and where in the sky it will be. We can predict it and be right with 100% accuracy. Predictability as well as falsifiability show that we do "know" many things, and I think can "know" everything eventually. But I think you're trying to "deconstruct" knowledge, and from a certain point of view you simply cannot do that. At least, to do it you have to set up parameters that are not reflective of reality. 
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